650 Group Blog

We attended Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCa) in Los Angeles, CA this week, as well as the AT&T Spark event in San Francisco. Since 5G is launching first the US, these two events became the public events where significant 5G-related announcements happened.

Verizon. Will launch 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on October 1 in four markets: Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento.

AT&T. The company reiterated its own 5G plans (mobile 5G by year-end 2018 in cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Raleigh, Waco, Houston, Jacksonville, Lousville, New Orleans and San Antonia), plus it made some announcements like that it is beginning 5G-ready CBRS equipment testing (using Samsung CBRS equipment and CommScope as SAS provider). Also, at the Spark event on Monday, the company announced three strategic telecom equipment suppliers, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung.

T-Mobile. Announced that it had completed a Cisco vEPC system (upgradeable to 5G Core) carrying traffic for 70M users that was from Cisco. It also announced that it signed a $3.5B 5G agreement with Ericsson. This is in addition to the July 30 announcement made earlier with Nokia for $3.5B, as well. Generally, the company has set expectations as recently as September 10 that it will provide nationwide 5G by the year 2020.

Additionally, discussions about spectrum in the US market were very active discussions. Some points we picked up on:

No new mid-band auctions will occur in the US market for another 2-3 years, so this means that new capacity is going to come from LAA (just announced on the iPhone Xs this week, as well) and from CBRS (discussed above).

The "who has the fastest 5G throughput" battle will be won at the millimeter wave. In other words, using millimeter was, speeds as high as 10 Gbps are possible, but with mid-band (1-6 Ghz), where LTE is currently deployed, cannot go much over 2 Gbps. So, to beat the Ookla Speed Test, the mobile operators who deploy mmWave early will get a leg up. However, in order to deploy mmWave, these have to be small-cells that are within 100 meters of users. Since it is so difficult to get real-estate rights and backhaul for small cells, this is going to be a big challenge. Nevertheless, this is how the battle will be won.

At the Ericsson Media and Analyst Briefing today, Ericsson's new CEO Borje Ekholm made his first MWC presentation, and then ceded the stage to well-known T-Mobile USA (TMUS) Chief Technology Officer, Neville Ray. We learned several things that were interesting: T-Mobile's plans for 5G rollout and 2G/3G shutdown, and Ericsson's high-level view on its strengths as 5G rolls out.

2/3rds of all voice minutes are now on Voice over LTE (VoLTE). Ray challenged anyone in the audience to find another telecom service provider with a greater percentage of minutes on VoLTE.

93% of all wireless data is transmitted on LTE

Plans to shut down 2G and/or 3G when 5G rolls out, elaborating that the company has decomissioned the 'lion's share' of 2G spectrum utilization. However, Ray says it has found significant customer interest in its 2G (GSM) network for connecting to Internet of Things (IoT) devices fitted with GSM modules. In fact, there is a debate at TMUS as to whether to shut down the 3G network before the 2G network. TMUS claims it has taken share from AT&T because its competitor shut down its 2G network and IoT customers in the US market have signed up with TMUS.

The company echoed views it has shared with the media in recent months - that it isn't so committed to virtualizing its network at this point. The CTO explained that it has a sufficiently modern network core that it isn't necessary to upgrade to a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) infrastructure - at least until it rolls out 5G - and he put the conversion-to-NFV timeframe at 3 to 4 years.

TMUS is not thrilled with the prospects for 5G fixed wireless, the kind that replaces wired broadband. He said that if this is all 5G does for the industry, we may as well all go home.

The company has deployed only 1,000 small cells to date. It plans as many as 5,000 to 6,000 by the end of 2017. Part of this rollout is using unlicensed spectrum, and it will roll out LTE-U and LAA.

Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm positioned Ericsson's view on 5G:

5G will be based on the cloud, and potentially we could see entire 5G networks running entirely on the cloud

Ericsson is well positioned in 5G due to its exposure to virtualization, security and its strong position in OSS/BSS.